The United Nations notes that water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, and an increasing number of regions are chronically short of water. By 2025 two-thirds of the world's population could be under water stress conditions as a result of increased populations. Water, especially potable water, is essential for all socio-economic developments and for maintaining a healthy population. As populations increase across the globe they call for an increased allocation of clean water for use, resulting in increased water scarcity.
One method to address water scarcity and conserve resources is the detection of leaks and other events occurring in water utility networks. Some experts estimate that losses due to leaks and theft amount to 25-30% of the water flowing through water utility networks. Therefore, a significant amount of water may be conserved merely by addressing the water loss in systems already controlled by humans.
Traditionally, detecting and locating leaks has been accomplished using simple and direct methods, such as acoustic measurements or direct physical inspection by utility personnel, such as field crews. However, these methods suffer from the drawbacks of requiring invasive measurements and possibly excavation works, which can impose a significant cost in both time and resources to the utility operators.
Currently, systems exist to facilitate detection of leaks and other anomalous events occurring in a water utility network. For example, some current systems in the market, such as water network sensors available from ABB Limited of England, or those discussed in patents such as U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,361,060 or 6,970,808 or U.S. patent application Ser. No. 0/247,331, profess to be able to detect leaks in some forms of resource delivery networks. An improved system, described in commonly owned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/717,944, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MONITORING RESOURCES IN A WATER UTILITY NETWORK” which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety, describes various systems and methods for detecting anomalies in a water utility network, using statistical techniques to provide a higher likelihood of accuracy than other existing or proposed systems. These and other systems identify the possibility of leaks or other anomalies with some general data about possible locations, based on affected sensors or meters.
Further resource management can be achieved by improving the current systems to help network operators determine more precisely the location of previously detected anomalies, to thereby find the leaks and other anomalies much more quickly, confirm them, and fix them. Often, in a typical scenario, when alerting on an anomaly the detection system or work process will yield a general location such as a DMA, or part of the water utility network, which must then be reduced to a pinpoint location by more expensive secondary means, such as a survey by field crew. The cost of determining such pinpoint location is generally proportional to the area or length of the network which must be explored to pinpoint the anomaly.
As such, there exists a need for improved systems and methods to further analyze data regarding anomalous events to refine a given general location of the events to a more precise identification of location, at a high degree of statistical accuracy.